Company's Ranking Of Safest N.J. Towns Puts Barnegat In Middle, Stafford, LBI Below Lakewood

News organizations love lists, especially best and worst lists. And they’re really good for one thing: stirring conversation.

That’s the case with the latest list from Value Penguin, a website/organization that spends much of its time looking at car insurance, health insurance and credit cards and offering insights and information designed to help consumers make choices on what is best for them.

The site recently made a foray into ranking New Jersey towns for safety, and the result of their analysis led to some findings sure to get people talking.

Barnegat came in at 174 out of the 474 cities ranked in the list, which was based on Value Penguin’s analysis of data from the 2013 FBI Unified Crime Report.

That ranking put the township in the top five safest Ocean County towns, behind Pine Beach (72), Ocean Township/Waretown (99), Manchester (146) and Jackson (172).

Stafford ranked 244, below several towns, including Lakewood, which came in at 215 on the Value Penguin report.

Long Beach Island towns took the biggest hit in the analysis, which was hard on towns that are primarily tourist destinations. Surf City was at 302, and Barnegat Light was 371. But the other LBI towns ranked finished in the five “least safe” towns in the county: Long Beach Township (427), Mantoloking (450), Harvey Cedars (453), Beach Haven (454) and Seaside Heights (467).

“The raw data report included violent crimes (murder/manslaughter, forcible rape, robbery, and aggravated assault) and property crimes (burglary, larceny-theft, motor vehicle theft, and arson) from all law enforcement agencies that participate in the FBI Uniform Crime Reporting program,” according to an explainer on the article. “We standardized the data to reflect violent and property crimes per 100k, to account for population. We then aggregated a ’crime score.’ In order to calculate this, we weighted violent crime at 90% and property crime at 10%; though property crime is far more prevalent, we figured that the violent crime data points are more relevant when calculating the relative safety of these cities. We then ranked the cities relative to each other based on their crime scores.”

Are the numbers misleading? Tell us what you think in the comments below.

Ocean County towns that were ranked, with their rankings, in alphabetical order (Berkeley Township and Eagleswood were not on the list):

• Barnegat 174
• Barnegat Light 371
• Bay Head 338
• Beach Haven 454
• Beachwood 236
• Harvey Cedars 453
• Jackson 172
• Lacey 257
• Lakehurst 269
• Lakewood 215
• Lavallette 258
• Little Egg Harbor 280
• Long Beach Township 427
• Mantoloking 450
• Manchester 146
• Ocean Gate 240
• Ocean Twp (Waretown) 99
• Pine Beach 72
• Point Pleasant 210
• Point Pleasant Beach 378
• Seaside Heights 467
• Seaside Park 349
• South Toms River 356
• Stafford 244
• Surf City 302
• Toms River 342
• Tuckerton 224